that photograph and to find the frame that would suit it. How eagerly she had hung it on the wall; and then had turned round to find it had made no difference in her life, or in any one's life. She looked at it now, her pretty lips set bitterly. What an idiot she had been! What difference could it have made? What had she ever thought it could do for her, she and the other women of Belton, everlastingly studying something or other, going after culture with such eagerness, bringing it home, hanging it on the wall, and turning round to find it had changed nothing, nothing. How silly they were! Nobody over here cared anything for "culture" or art, or sculptures—except badly-dressed, queer people with socialistic ideas, like Marise's music-teacher.
And they were right not to care. What was there in it for any one? What could she ever have thought there was? What earthly difference did the sculptures on the South Portal make to her. Flora Allen, driven along through life, without getting out of it a single one of the things women really wanted? What good did it do any one to go and gape at the paintings in the Museum, most of them ugly, and all of them as dead as dead? When what you wanted was to be alive! To have gaiety and sparkle and cheerfulness in your life, not to vegetate and mold like the primitive lower forms of life around you, like Isabelle; not to dry and harden and become a mere block of wood like old Jeanne!
There was nothing unreasonable in not wanting to shrivel and stagnate. It was right to want to have an ardent life, full and deep, that carried you out of yourself.
But in her life, as by a fatality, there were never any occasions for emotion, for fresh, living sensations. Nothing ever happened to her that could stir her to anything but petulance and boredom—nothing! nothing! If anything seemed to promise to—why. Fate always cut it short. Those wonderful afternoons when Sister Ste. Lucie had taken her to the convent to talk to Father Elie! From the first of her Bayonne life she had felt it very romantic to know real Catholics, who used holy-water and believed in saints, and she had loved to go round with Sister Ste. Lucie in her long black gown and
